Myanmar: A Tragedy For Asia And The World

Mira Kamdar 05.09.08, 1:14 PM ETIn the critical days after cyclone Nargis slammed into the Irawaddy delta of Myanmar, aid is slowly trickling into the country. But it is too little too late for many of the victims.

Casualties officially put at 22,000 are estimated to be closer to 100,000 by the senior American diplomat on the ground. Without food or clean water, with no shelter from heavy rains and with no way of disposing of so many dead, many of the victims whose live were spared by the furious storm now risk perishing of hunger or water-born disease. The need is acute. Thousands have lost their homes. Some have even lost the clothes on their backs.

The great mystery is whether or not the regime itself believes this cruel crock. It is one of the world's most paranoid and superstitious, and maybe genuinely delusional. Only three years ago, on the basis of astrological advice, the junta moved the capital of Myanmar 320 kilometers north of Yangon (formerly Rangoon), the country's principal city and the capital of the country since 1948, to a new location near the nondescript village of Pyinmana. Imagine suddenly moving, on the advice of an astrologer, the government of the United States from Washington, D.C., to a cornfield near Fargo, N.D., and you have some idea of what the move entailed.

Needless to say, the new capital, dubbed Naypyidaw, remains under construction. One suspects that most of the high-ranking military officers, government officials and their families, the most privileged and wealthiest of the country's citizens, weren't entirely happy with being exiled from the urban oasis of Yangon, though they dared not complain.

They may be happier now. How can it be, many Burmese citizens are asking, that the cyclone nearly destroyed Yangon, where the country's champion of democracy Aung San Suu Kyi is still under house arrest (in a house that lost its roof in the cyclone) and spared Naypyidaw the fantasy-capital of the junta?

The long-suffering Burmese had held a secret hope, the only one to which they could cling, that divine sanction would one day rain down on the murderous regime and wipe out the new capital. They have lost even this small ray of hope. As for the generals, their descent into madness has gotten a boost: Weren't they right after all to heed the astrologer's warning and evacuate Yangon three years before this disaster?

This combination of paranoia and confirmed self-delusion is behind the regime's otherwise incomprehensible decision to go ahead with a national referendum on a new constitution this coming Sunday. The constitution has been rejected by the opposition National League for Democracy as ratifying a profoundly undemocratic sham of democracy. It prohibits, among other things, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was given a landslide victory by Myanmar's people the last time elections were held in 1995, from ever leading the country. It would also preserve military authority over any democratically elected portion of the government. The regime calls this "disciplined democracy," an oxymoron that is lost on it.

Myanmar's tragedy is the whole region's. Politically, it shows up the spineless conduct of ASEAN in welcoming Myanmar into its fold without making any meaningful demands on the junta. Though Thailand has put some useful pressure on Myanmar's generals to allow a small amount of foreign aid, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a whole has remained virtually silent.

Tragically, the area that has been the hardest hit is Myanmar's most productive rice growing region. Much of the country's rice crop on which millions of Burmese depend has been destroyed. Millions more people across Southeast Asia, who were counting on rice from Myanmar to help ease current shortages, may also now go hungry. To say that Myanmar's tragedy is the world's tragedy is no exaggeration.

Mira Kamdar is the 2008 Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society, and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World (Scribner 2008).

I found it from here.